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In this article, our aim is to foreground men's discourses on gender-based violence as linked to gendered hierarchies, power struggles, and social respectability in Ghana. Situated within decolonial feminist theories and drawing on interviews, we argue that men's interpretations of masculinity and the possibility of perpetrating violence against women is significantly mediated by such intersectional factors as sociocultural background, education, and broader societal normative requirements. The findings deepen the understanding of the ambiguities and contradictions that characterize men's talk of violence. The article discusses how these ambiguities and contradictions serve as important domains for engendering critical attitudes toward violence against women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Calls to engage community leaders in preventing gender-based violence against women have gained global prominence in recent years. Situated within the growing calls for greater community leaders' engagement, this article problematizes the assumptions that efforts to mobilize community gatekeepers in violence prevention are likely to yield better results. Drawing inspiration from decolonial African feminist perspectives coupled with five focus group discussions conducted with 30 community leaders in the patriarchal setting of Northwestern Ghana, this article highlights the potential limitations of these assumptions by paying attention to the multiple ways; albeit subtly, in which community leaders as cultural gatekeepers may individually or collectively reproduce and sustain dominant cultural tropes that normalize violence against women. Our findings show that cultural gatekeepers' perspectives on and their approaches to addressing violence against women risk normalizing and perpetuating it. If policy makers, development practitioners, and researchers are to adequately address the violence of men, a useful starting point is to build on community leaders' perspectives, attitudes, and responses to violence as a collective issue. By building on these, we will be able to challenge and deconstruct the multiple ways in which community leaders' approaches to addressing violence are reinforcing gendered subordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical studies on men and masculinities have gained significant momentum in feminist scholarship in the past decades. The growing interest in feminist scholarship has focused broadly on how male-bodied people construct, negotiate, and express masculine identities. Despite this growing interest, insufficient attention has explored how rurally based Ghanaian men construct and negotiate their masculinities in intimate relationships. Situated within critical discursive psychology and drawing on 16 semi-structured in-depth interviews and 6 focus group discussions with adult men in northwestern Ghana, the results show that dominant notions of masculinity provide a broad context through which participants' narratives, negotiations, and experiences on intimate partner violence could be understood. Findings suggest that various cultural narratives and metaphors were deployed to support men's controlling behaviors and/or intimate violence against women. The implications of how harmful masculine ideologies could frustrate efforts that target the development and promotion of a socially just and less oppressive society are presented and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]